Marketing has come a long way from the days of print advertising, television, radio and other old fashioned marketing tools. In 2021, there are more accessible opportunities than ever before to get your business the exposure it deserves on a local and global scale, all thanks to digital marketing.
Digital marketing includes SEO, PPC and many other practices that help maximize your businesses growth. If you’re new to the world of paid search, it can be overwhelming. Let’s start with some basics about Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.
Also known as search engine marketing (SEM), PPC is not as simple as it sounds. It’s easy to blow through your budget with PPC and have nothing to show for it if you don’t know what you’re doing. PPC, done right, is incredibly valuable for businesses and brands of all sizes who want to grow and be profitable. Below are the basics of PPC and a more in-depth explanation on why it’s so important to incorporate PPC into your digital marketing advertising strategies.
What is PPC?
Digital marketing has a lot to do with how and what platforms your company is advertising on. They allow you to display ads that are relevant to what users are searching for. Pay Per Click deals entirely with web traffic that is paid for. The cost per click is governed by many factors, including your business domain and keyword competition, quality score, and more in a detailed subsequent section.
PPC advertising is a controlled, measured and highly budgeted way of reaching your target audience. It has gained a positive reputation over the years on account of the high revenue it is capable of generating.
How it Works
Although paid ad space can be bought on social media channels such as YouTube, Google, Facebook and others, this section will focus on PPC for text ads on Google. One of the essential digital marketing goals is having your website rank high on Google naturally. It is important for your website to rank high on Google, since it will help bring brand-new traffic to your website.
In order for ads to appear alongside the results on a search engine or SERP for short, advertisers cannot just pay more to ensure that their ads appear more prominently than their competitors’. Instead, ads are subject to what is known as the Ad Auction, an entirely automated process that Google and other major search engines use to determine the relevance and validity of advertisements that appear on their SERPs.
Google Ads and Google Local Ads
There are several types of PPC advertisements. The two major types are Google Ads and Google Local Ads. These two ad tools will benefit you and your company by increasing traffic to your website while gaining more conversions. Conversions are important since they show you how your ads are converting into sales. You’re paying for Google to put your business ahead of other businesses in the search engine results page (SERP). Paying for the higher spot gives you leverage. You create your ads exactly how you want them, with no guesswork. You then ‘bid’ on keywords to win a spot at the top of the SERPs. Conversions turn into revenue for your business. Google Ads can also raise brand awareness for your business. Both of these things are the desired end results for using PPC.
Why PPC Advertising is Important
PPC affords you a huge amount of control through geo-targeting, ad scheduling, ad rotation, bid strategies, keyword planning/research, data reporting features, and more. Not only does this help create a campaign for your unique needs that will reach only those you want to approach, but it will also help you track where you are doing well and where you are not. Besides these helpful features, you even have the option to run multiple campaigns at the same time for various keywords and audiences. You can also pause campaigns if you are not receiving good conversions or traffic.
Our team of digital marketing experts stays up to date on all the latest algorithm changes and trends on Google and the other major search engines. PPC, done properly, provides an unbeatable ROI.
